Installing on Linux Mint

hey ,there i have just installed LINUX MINT 12 LISA dvd of my desktop . but can not install any tar.ball ....but i can nicely install deb. file . is there any thing necessary to update to of my system. please give me a proper direction i am not experienced in Linux

Re: give me a proper direction

Originally Posted by Hasan55

hey ,there i have just installed LINUX MINT 12 LISA dvd of my desktop . but can not install any tar.ball ....but i can nicely install deb. file . is there any thing necessary to update to of my system. please give me a proper direction i am not experienced in Linux

What tar ball? May be your tar ball needs to be compiled first, in that case you need to install build-essentials and automake.

Re: give me a proper direction

Originally Posted by Hasan55

thanks....... but can you give me proper direction of any kinds of tar.ball installsion

A "tar.ball" is roughly equivalent to a "zip" or "rar" file in Windows. You'll usually (but not always) need to unpack it first. There is often a "readme" file with instructions for installation included in the tarball.

Re: give me a proper direction

thanks....... but can you give me proper direction of any kinds of tar.ball installsion

There should be a readme or a file called install in the tar ball which gives you the directions which may differ from program to program.

The common thing (but not always, check the readme) is
1) unzip the tar ball (just right click it an extract or you can use a command line depending on what kind of tar ball it is (tar.gz or tar.bz etc)

2) cd into the directory where the tar ball is unzipped to,

3) type ./configure and note the output, it will tell you if you have missing dependencies, there are other options you may enable or disable depending on your program.

4) if step 3 works without error, type make

5) sudo make install
(instead of this you can install the package checkinstall and run sudo checkinstall, this way it will create and install a .deb package, which is easy to remove from package managers such as synaptic, otherwise there may be pieces scattered all over that you need to remove them manually in case you don't want the program any more)

Like I said, this is the way to compile and install many programs from source but not always, read the instructions first,

No package 'gnome-media-profiles' found
No package 'libsoup-2.4' found
No package 'libsoup-gnome-2.4' found

Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.

Alternatively, you may set the environment variables RHYTHMBOX_CFLAGS
and RHYTHMBOX_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config.
See the pkg-config man page for more details.
hasan@ruhul-desktop ~/Desktop/rhythmbox-0.13.3 $ make
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.
hasan@ruhul-desktop ~/Desktop/rhythmbox-0.13.3 $

I'm not sure if these are available in the repo but try it out anyway . If this doesn't work , find the tarballs to these files , configure and make install them .
Then you can go ahead with your rhythmbox installation .

If you want a specific package (eg: Rhythmbox) then first search if this package has an available .deb file , so you can install it more easy (or maybe through a PPA).

Also Linux-Mint Lisa is Ubuntu 11.10 based (I think) and will be EOL in a few months. April 2013.
Maybe is time to consider an upgrade to Linux-mint 13 (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS based , supported until April 2017).

Re: give me a proper direction

if you just want to install some required software, you don't need to compile anything or download any tar balls , just go to software centre and find your desired applications and install them, actually it is much easier than windows.